News You Can Bruise for 2004 October 8

As suggested and previously reported, Sumana and I went to see Napoleon Dynamite the other day. I can confirm that the main character is basically me in high school; not in general like "yeah, I was a misfit in high school", but in fair detail down to the mannerisms. Also, Efren Ramirez, who plays Napoleon's buddy, looks a lot like my high school buddy Dario Espinoza (however, Dario is much cooler than the character in the movie).

The movie takes place in the present day or at least in the late '90s, but aesthetically everyone in the movie seems ten to fifteen years behind the times. They all dress like my junior high classmates. I don't know if this was a conceit of the movie to make the characters look dorky or if it was a way of making fun of rural Idaho or if rural Idaho is actually stuck in the early '90s (Do you guys need help? Wait, actually, can we join you?). What goes on here?

It was a good character study movie and I recommend it. It starts out looking like a lot of set pieces, but the set pieces cohere into a story, but the story doesn't really have a plot because if there were a plot the characters would find out what it was and then try to ruin it for various reasons.

Lebowski watch: there was a brief bowling alley scene which can only be explained as a Lebowski homage. Why else would characters in a movie enter a bowling alley?

Sumana, I think the reason the theater is spooky is that nobody goes there, and it's supposedly part of a mall but it's actually across the street from the mall on the edge of a residential area.